Will Facebook new App for the workplace be successful?
By Ruben de Maere
Due to Facebook its global recognition the app will have a great chance to be successful, certainly in the early stages of the release. There are about 1.4 billion people who are using Facebook now so it will be no surprise that a number of people and companies are going to try the application.
There are a lot of advantages that come with the app. From our perspective as students we think that it is very clever to use in industry. Especially if you have to work in group, you can update documents, ask questions or polls, that can be seen by your colleagues very easily, and you can also see who has read the question.
Most people are used to the Facebook interface, so companies don’t need to invest too many resources into workshops and training programs for their personnel.
The Facebook app offers something extra if we compare it with other apps like LinkedIn. Group chatting and posting is a much more efficient way of communicating instead of emailing. Mailboxes often get full and it isn’t an exception of you got more than 100 mails in your mailbox daily. A lot of Chinese companies communicate internally with QQ, a Chinese variant of Microsoft its chat program, MSN.
It’s also clever of Facebook that they already used the app internally for a quite long time, that way there will be less errors in the app.
Facebook needs to be very careful about its private policy towards the companies who are using the app. Companies can be very sensitive if it comes to its privacy. For now Facebook doesn’t really know yet what path it’s going to take concerning advertising and gathering personal information from its users. We too agree that most companies would prefer to pay an extra fee instead of getting ads and risking the chance of losing internal information.
